There is growing concern in the British intelligence agency, MI5, that radicalized citizens who have fought alongside Al Qaeda militias in Syria will return to Britain to carry out terror attacks.

Channel 4 prepared the following video report which examines the process of radicalization of these young Muslims, usually recruited through extremist websites and social media networks which glorify the idea of becoming a martyr, promising paradise to anyone dying fighting against Assad’s regime in Syria. Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the Int’l Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, shows the pictures used to entice the young men to join the Islamist militants.

“My feeling is great, hamdullallah (thank Allah), I’m happy I’m here. And I’m here to please Allah… and I’m not here to please anyone else but Allah,” he added, describing his aim as contributing to jihad on behalf of Muslims.

During the entire video, all of the men were masked, revealing only their eyes, and none provided their names.

A second British citizen blamed his government and prime minister for perpetrating “crimes” against Muslims. He tied his objectives with those of the killers of Lee Rigby, the British soldier who was hacked to death in the London neighborhood of Woolwich in May. The perpetrators – both Muslim converts – described their motives as revenge for the killing of Muslims by British forces serving in the Middle East.

“Like the guy in Woolwich, he explained that [Prime Minister] David Cameron would never walk on the street, and he’ll never get shot in the face, whereas you guys who are soldiers, or just normal folk, will take the blame for the crimes that are committed worldwide by Britain itself so we have to fight. It’s part of our obligation…to protect our honor, to protect our women,” the Syrian rebel from the UK said.

After Syria, the aim is “to bring back the honor of Islam from Filastine [Palestine] to Al Aqsa to all over the Muslim world, and Britain will be next,” said one of the British jihadis.

“From this land we will march toward the Al Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem] in the name of Allah. Allahu Akbar! [Allah is the greatest],” said another.

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According to a Daily Beast report last month, U.S. intelligence estimates vary about the number of Americans who have gone on jihad in Syria, ranging from 10 to 60.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers has called the Syrian civil war a “jihadist magnet.” He told the Daily Beast in September, “At some point all of these people from Europe are going home. All the folks there from all over the world, including the United States, will be coming home if they do not meet their end on the battlefield.”

The Washington Post has published an online gallery of the 50-slide erstwhile “medical grand rounds” given on June 27, 2007 by avowed jihadist psychiatrist Nidal Hasan.

Although Hasan merely reiterates salient aspects of classical jihad theory (i.e.,see slides 35, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, and 49), this reality is understandably “shocking” to the elites in our media, military, and government who are now so obviously derelict in their duty to have learned what they still refuse to learn about the living doctrine and history of the religion of peace (or peace and love if you prefer Condoleeza Rice’s even more fatuous construction).

“Fighting to establish an Islamic State to please Allah, even by force is condoned by (sic) Islam.”

Our immediate, urgent task is to understand the extent to which Nidal Hasan’s orthodox vision of Islam is a shared vision—and by which Muslims, in particular.

The seat of Sunni orthodoxy Al Azhar University—which functions as a de facto Vatican of Sunni Islam, repeats in “Reliance of the Traveller” its widely distributed manual of Islamic Law, which “conforms to the practice and faith of the Sunni orthodoxy,” circa 1991,

“ Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and, is etymologically derived from the word, mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion [of Islam]…The scriptural basis for jihad is such Koranic verses as ‘Fighting is prescribed for you’ (Koran 2:216); ‘Slay them wherever you find them’ (Koran 4:89); ‘Fight the idolators utterly’ (Koran 9:36); and such hadiths as the one related by (Sahih) Bukhari and (Sahih) Muslim [NOTE: cited in slide 43 of Hasan’s 6/7/07 presentation] that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: ‘I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And the final reckoning is with Allah’; and the hadith by (Sahih) Muslim, ‘To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it.’ ”

Even more concrete evidence that this classical formulation of jihad is very much a living doctrine today is apparent in the openly espoused views, and sound Islamic arguments which conclude the contemporary work “Islam and Modernism,” written by a respected modern Muslim scholar Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani. Mr Usmani, aged 66, sat for 20 years as a Shari’a judge in Pakistan’s Supreme Court (His father was the Grand Mufti of Pakistan). Currently Usmani is deputy of the Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) Council of the Organization of the Islamic Conference—the major international body of Islamic nations in the world, and serves as an adviser to several global Sharia-based Islamic financial institutions. Thus he is a leading contemporary figure in the world of mainstream Islamic jurisprudence. Mr. Usmani is also a regular visitor to Britain. During a recent visit there, he was interviewed by the Times of London, which published extracts from Usmani’s writings on jihad, Saturday, September 8, 2007. The concluding chapter of Usmani’s “Islam and Modernism” was cited, and it rebuts those who believe that only defensive jihad (i.e., fighting to defend a Muslim land deemed under attack or occupation) is permissible in Islam. He also refutes the suggestion that jihad is unlawful against a non-Muslim state that freely permits the preaching of Islam (which, not surprisingly, was of some concern to The Times!).

For Mr Usmani, “the question is whether aggressive battle is by itself commendable or not.” “If it is, why should the Muslims stop simply because territorial expansion in these days is regarded as bad? And if it is not commendable, but deplorable, why did Islam not stop it in the past?” He answers his own question as follows: “Even in those days . . . aggressive jihads were waged . . . because it was truly commendable for establishing the grandeur of the religion of Allah.” Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practice Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle. Usmani explodes the myths that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking, or that this living institution is somehow irrelevant to our era.

And the preponderance of contemporary mainstream Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, apparently share with their murderous, jihad terror waging co-religionist Nidal Hasan classical jihad’s ultimate goal: re-establishing an Islamic Caliphate, or global empire based upon jihad conquest and the imposition of Islamic Law. Polling data released April 24, 2007 in a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.orginterview survey of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007-1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians-reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed-almost 2/3, hardly a “fringe minority”-desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”), including 49% of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims. The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition “To require a strict [emphasis added] application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country.”

The findings from the University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org poll are ominous—indicating plainly to any rational mind willing to comprehend—the vast underpinning of support for Nidal Hasan’s orthodox vision of Islam, from the creed’s most respected religious leaders, to ordinary Muslims. Our self-righteously ignorant elites—particularly those in political and military leadership positions—must be held accountable by the American public for their ignorance, and worse still, deliberate obfuscation of these plain Islamic realities.

Because Ahmed was the first Muslim peer, most people were eager to do anything they could to cover for him, forgive him, reinstate him time and again – and even now are not able to believe the words that came from his mouth in Pakistan because they differed from the words that came from his mouth at interfaith meetings in London.

Interfaith dialogue is one of those things it can seem impossible to be against. What reasonable, rational person could possibly object to people of different faiths coming together and discussing their differences? Well, as with any negotiation, the problem only really comes if one individual, or group of individuals, heads into the discussion ignorantly or naively while another knows exactly what he is planning to get from it.

Such is the case with much of the interfaith dialogue conversations in Britain today and there can be no better exemplar than that thrown up by an old friend of this column – the disgraced ex-Labour peer Lord Ahmed of Rotherham.

Lord Ahmed, it will be remembered is the serially expelled “first Muslim peer” in Britain. Having been hastily promoted by the Labour party, his career in public life reached a nadir a few years ago when, whilst texting on his mobile phone, the noble lord ran over and killed a man on a motorway. Ahmed went to jail for driving offenses, and has cropped up a number of times since – most recently a few weeks ago, when a recording came to light – courtesy of the Times (London) newspaper – showing Ahmed on television in Pakistan. In that interview (conducted in Urdu) Ahmed was shown, among other things, blaming his conviction and imprisonment for driving offences on Jewish lawyers and Jewish media.

Swiftly expelled by the Labour party, Ahmed had to face yet another disciplinary process (he has been reinstated before). He has now said that he does not wish to go through the process and has resigned from the Labour party. So far, so sad. But one of the matters least considered was his membership in numerous groups which held themselves out as providing “interfaith dialogue” between the Muslim community and – in particular – the Jewish community. The Joseph Interfaith Foundation, for instance, featured Ahmed as a Trustee.

The Joseph Interfaith Foundation declares itself to be “committed to fostering engagement through constructive and realistic dialogue and interaction between the Muslim and Jewish communities in Britain. The Foundation also aims to promote a deeper understanding of both faiths among the general public.” How that squares with having one of your Trustees blame the Jews for his driving offense and sentencing is a difficult question to answer. What seems at least plausible is that Ahmed – who had a long track record of sympathizing with the most extreme Islamists – used interfaith networks to give himself credibility.

Last week The Times reported on an anti-Semitic rant from the Labour peer Lord Ahmed. In an interview on Pakistani television in 2012, Lord Ahmed remarked that the prison sentence he had received in 2009 for dangerous driving was due to pressure that had been placed on the courts by “Jewish friends who own newspapers and TV channels”. He added: “My case became more critical because I went to Gaza to support Palestinians”, something that these Jews “opposed”.

These remarks are truly extraordinary. Lord Ahmed seems to believe that his actions were completely insignificant, until, that is, he came up against a vindictive Jewish establishment that was determined to punish him for his political views. Quite how this consortium of Jewish media magnates was able to manipulate the legal establishment is not clear. Still, there is no doubting that he was invoking the spectre of ‘Jewish power’ to explain his misfortune.

What is so disturbing here is not just the arrogance of his comments or the rehashing of anti-Semitic tropes; it is the fact that Lord Ahmed is a distinguished peer of the realm, a figure regarded in polite society as a genuine Muslim moderate.

Why did a figure in such an elevated position issue such a racist diatribe? The simple answer is that ‘blaming the Jews’ has become a ubiquitous feature of Muslim discourse, even in liberal western societies. The notion of personal and communal responsibility has been undermined by a cult of victimhood and a belief in paranoid conspiracy theories.

The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force met with officials close to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi during a secret two-day visit to Egypt just after Christmas. The Times of London calls it “another blow to Cairo’s fragile relationship with the West.”

Gen. Qassem Soleimani’s “meeting was intended to send a message to America, which is putting pressure on the Egyptian government, that we be allowed to have other alliances we please,” a source told the Times.

The U.S. State Department designated Soleimeini as a terrorist, and the Quds Force serves as Iran’s primary unit for training and equipping foreign Islamic revolutionary movements. The Quds Force was responsible for setting up Hizballah in the 1980s and has been involved in training Hamas, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

The Iranian paramilitary leader met with Essam al-Haddad, one of Morsi’s foreign affairs advisers, and Muslim Brotherhood officials, to advise them on building a security and intelligence apparatus independent from the national intelligence services that are controlled by the Egyptian military.

A report in The Australian suggests that the Egyptians invited Soleimani to meet.

“When the Iranian revolutionaries took control they didn’t trust the military, so they setup a parallel system independent of Iran’s army that has been quite successful,” Heritage Foundation Middle East expert James Phillips told the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

Consequently, the Brotherhood likely sees the IRGC/Quds Force as a successful model to copy, Phillips said.

Interior Minister Ahmed Gamal al-Din was forced out of the government after he objected to the meeting, Al-Arabiyahreported Thursday.

In addition, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi arrived in Cairo Wednesday for talks that Iran hopes could lead to expanded ties with Egypt. The two countries have not had diplomatic ties since Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1970 and granted asylum to the shah after he was overthrown.

Relations between Iran and Egypt have steadily improved since Morsi, a longtime Muslim Brotherhood figure, was inaugurated in July. Morsi also met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his late August visit to Tehran for the Non-Aligned Movement summit.

Syria will be high on the agenda during Salehi’s visit, according to Iran’s Fars News Agency.

Iran and Egypt have competing interests in Syria, with the Iranians backing the Assad regime and the Egyptians supporting their Muslim Brotherhood brethren in their rebellion.

The meetings between the Brotherhood and Iran send the message that Egypt will move closer to Iran if the United States and other Western nations cut off aid, an unnamed Egyptian official told the Times.

“It is another sign that the Muslim Brotherhood is distancing itself from the U.S.,” he said. “It is wishful thinking the State Department, the CIA and other agencies that they can count on the Muslim Brotherhood as an ally against the more extremist Islamists.”